Fright
by Underwater Owl
Summary: The year following Light Yagami's death, things begin to go wrong. Is it the house? Is it Near? Is it ever going to stop?
1. Prologue

The best ghost stories begin at night. Or at least, they're told at night. In the darkness, around campfires, in tents, without the comfort of four walls around us, without the comfort of blankets to dive under, we forget our rationality. We forget that we _know _things about the world; there are no such thing as ghosts. A branch brushes the back of our neck, and no matter what we know, when we've been thinking about ghosts, we scream. It's exhilarating.

Near wouldn't know. Near has never been camping. Near has never been outside the antiseptic world of white walls and foam computer chairs, whirring electronics and fluorescent lights. Near has never watched a horror movie, or read anything by Misters King, Cortázar or Lovecraft. He has certainly never had someone whisper anything frightening in his ear, in a hushed voice, clutching a flashlight or a stick for holding marshmallows.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

A year ago, they'd moved the SPK headquarters back to Winchester. With funds depleted after the Kira case, Near had required himself to work steadily at cases with financial benefits and rewards. In the mean time, there was property to be sold, in a number of countries around the globe. Enough to finance Near's trip home and the continued running of the orphanage, as well of the salaries of the SPK- now simply assistants to the detective N. Not to mention healthy Christmas bonuses, on account of having destroyed the single greatest threat to the freedom of humankind in the history of the world.

Halle and Gevanni had celebratory sexual intercourse in the conference room. Near took the cost of the disinfecting of the room out of their wages; not because he had to, but in hopes of encouraging them never to do so again. The measure was successful. In the heat of the moment, the couple had forgotten the omnipresent surveillance cameras, or perhaps hoped that Near wouldn't be reviewing the footage, and wouldn't know that biological fluids had been dribbled all over his table. He also provides pamphlets about government policy on maternity and paternity leave. Never did he pretend not to be slightly sadistic.

The new house isn't wired for surveillance yet. He considers the delay unpardonable. It would be possible to use N's reputation to cut through the red tape of work permits and safety codes, but to do so without revealing the position of his new headquarters would be needlessly complicated. He pads through the halls in his socks, along next to the plastic wrap the builders had left, the strings of wires and sawdust. The floorboards creak under his feet; he'll need to fix that too. At this rate, the mansion will be ready by the time he's ready to retire. He takes a sip of his milk carefully, one hand on the banister as he climbs the curved stair up to his bedroom.

Near doesn't know this either, but the new headquarters are the perfect setting for a ghost story. It creaks, and moans in the wind. It has banisters and hardwood, plaster walls and tall windows, French doors and bells to ring maids that no longer live just outside a set of baize doors. All the cleaning is outsourced, as it were, to the company that handles the running of the orphanage. Melinda is the one who vacuums Near's room. He's explained to her hot to do it in a way that doesn't leave troublesome lines all over the carpet. Near suspects she hates him almost as much as he hates carpet lines. The servants quarters have been converted to a storage room; super computers and filing cabinets both.

The shutters bang open and closed. It's because of the drafts. Air pressure shifts in the house give Halle chronic nosebleeds the first three weeks they live there. She complains constantly, and Near looks green at the sight of every wastepaper basket full of bloody tissue. Gevanni starts to mutter about the bitch of a house, and no one takes him seriously. Near murmurs about carpet lines, and no one listens to him, either. Tension is rising, tempers are starting to flare. Gevanni and Halle have a lovers' quarrel that nearly prompts Near to dismiss them both. The brief relationship ends, and Gevanni goes out and drinks. Rester talks Near out of firing the wayward agents, on the grounds that training replacements would be troublesome. He is forced to agree.

Emotions are plainly a waste of time. Near settles down to his power ranger action figures, and begins to work on cases. He starts at three am that morning and continues solidly until midnight, pausing only to take bites of food between flipping pages. He stops once, at six forty eight precisely, to allow himself to think;

'_Mello would never have been able to work like this.'_

Then he continues with the cases.

oooooooooooooo

The highlight of Near's first year as the new L is his domino castle. It comprises of over ten thousand pieces, employs enough tricks and careful calculations to make an engineering student drool. It keeps him rational and calm through the unprofessional melodrama, through the countless frustrations and humiliations of having to pick up the title he'd so coveted, only to find it in ruins. It's an easy distraction while he solves the matter of the financial destitution.

It reminds him that there are more important things to work on, that he will have a chance to select the cases he wants. It will be soon. It has to be, or he may very well start going crazy.

oooooooooooooo

If he had been raised by his parents, his father would have delighted in reciting, as they were told to him, various tales and exaggerations about family members and history; the grandfather who vanished and returned years later, without memory of anything that had happened. The strange lights in the windows the night of his mother's birth. The green hand that lived in the lake and only came out to hunt for little children once a year! Then Near would have shrieked and laughed, as his father grabbed his ankle to demonstrate and started to tickle him, and his mother would have made soft comments about not getting him riled up before bed.

In the middle of the night, he would probably have crawled into bed with them. Neither would have minded that at all. Snug as a bug in a rug, he'd have gone to sleep, hair twirled around one finger, head tucked lovingly under his mother's chin. He would have been normal; brilliant, vivacious, gifted, and shy, but socially graceful and prone to laughter.

His parents were killed when he was very young. Near has never been told a ghost story. So when he slides his feet off the edge of the bed and sets them on the floor, only to have something grip his ankle from under the bed, his reaction is to feel faintly perplexed. After a moment, he looks down. There's nothing there. He stands, then kneels, and peeks underneath. There's nothing there. He would suspect himself of imagining it, except that he's fairly sure he didn't. It's possible the fabric of his pyjama pants snagged and pulled, giving him the illusion of having his foot held. That's an unlikely explanation, so Near goes to the doctor for a complete health check and neurological work up, just in case it means something is wrong.


	2. Continuity of the Parks

By the end of the week, the hands are everywhere. They snuggle in his hair when he doesn't expect it. They curl around the back of his collar and yank. They clutch at his ankles as he climbs out of bed, and as he goes up the staircase. He trips, and drops his milk. Rester looks concerned, as he cleans up the shattered glass, and removes the splinter of it from Near's palm. This sort of clumsiness just isn't like him. Near avoids Rester's eyes.

The cut oozes blood, enough that Near follows obediently to the first aid cabinet and lets Rester apply all the bandages he wants. It might be his imagination, but the little tugs at his collar seem to take on a faintly apologetic quality. Near didn't know he _had _an imagination, but he must. The doctors would have contacted him by now if something had shown up on any of the tests they'd put him through. A neurological problem like this couldn't really be invisible; perhaps it was time to consider consulting a therapist?

The bandaid the eventually end up applying has a cartoon mouse on it. Near's cultural education is lacking; he doesn't recognize it as Minnie. He peels it off in the bath, the next morning, inspecting the scab underneath. It's reddish brown and smaller than he thought it would be. He wants to peel it off, even though he knows it'd just make it start bleeding all over again. It makes his hand feels clumsy. If he could just itch his fingernail underneath it and pull, the evidence of these troublesome events would be off his body. Logically he knows that peeling away one scab won't return his agents to normal, won't finalize his construction permits or put away the wires , and won't get rid of the mice he can hear in the attic above his bedroom.

At this point, something presses on his shoulders. Two big hands, human and warm. He looks up, even though he knows there's no one in the room with him. He recognizes the touch. (This has been going on too long, he shouldn't recognize the touch of someone who _doesn't exist.)_ The hands on his shoulders linger for a moment or two, then shove downwards. His shoulders slip down the back of the bath, then his head is under water. Near is too startled to do anything other than gasp for breath, choking on a lungful of soapy water. He tries to scream, and to fight, but he's already drowning. Black spots spin in front of his eyes, and his lungs ache. He fights to break the surface, but there are hands everywhere...

He wakes up sweat soaked, tangled in his sheets, gasping into the pillows. His lip is swollen, and other places hurt. There are rugburns on his knees and the tops of his feet, and bruises all over both legs.

It isn't the first nightmare he's had, but it's the first one that's ever hurt him this badly. It's the first one that's ever had him confused about where the day before ended and the dreaming began. There are marks on his finger- gummy, grey lines that you get when a bandage has been pulled off and the adhesive hasn't been entirely cleaned away, leaving the dirt and dust to catch and stick to the place where the thing used to be. There was a band aid. Was there a cartoon mouse on it? It's missing, the waste baskets in the bathrooms have all been emptied. He even checks his sheets for it, in case it came off during the night.

He can't operate like this. He needs to seek further professional aid.

oooooooooo

The neurologist's face lights up on the return visit. The marks on his legs are indicative of seizures, they explain. The bitten lip is seminal. For the first time in his life, Near has difficulty focusing on what's being said around him. Rester stands behind him, arms folded, intimidating the doctors as the shuffle in and out of the room making various suggestions and consulting with each other. It's decided that he'll have to stay in the hospital for some time, since it's impossible to detect seizure activity while he's not directly hooked up to the appropriate equipment.

They latch, tape, wire and adjust him in to all the bits and pieces they want. He sits, and opens a file. He won't admit it to Rester, he'll barely admit it to himself, but he'll be glad to spend one night outside of the new headquarters. The whitewashed, soap-smelling hospital is more the environment he prefers, even with the procession of medical personnel in and out of the room, looking at him, seeing his face. He's personally burned every death note to fall to earth yet, but it still isn't a comfortable feeling. He takes comfort in the uniformity of the bed linens, when they encourage him to lie down and try to sleep. He runs the tips of his fingers over them, making creases and valleys, strategic structures for invisible toy soldiers to use in battles he'll never be able to set up. He stopped playing with toy soldiers when he was six, after Mello persisted in knocking apart all his arrangements with flicked elastics. Roger had never tried to stop him.

Near doesn't sleep in the hospital. He doesn't want to, and he also fears that he couldn't if he tried. Eventually they unhitch and unhook him, sending him packing with a few muttered words and a promise of prescriptions should the symptoms present themselves again. None of them, Near included, believe at this point that he's epileptic. It seems improbable, and stupid, and just... not possible. After shinigami and books that kill people whose name are written in them, it seems like less of a stretch to put his faith in the supernatural than it does to accept that his brain might have a very fundamental _problem _with it that could account for late onset epilepsy.

oooooooooo

That afternoon, he solves a case. The child was three, the mother was in her forties and barely home. She had been entrusted to a series of care givers since the day she was born. She had always been sickly. The father was a business man, and travelling at the time the murder was committed. At first, the doctors thought it was a natural death, attributable to the unusual symptoms she had displayed all her life. Then an intrepid young man with more of a sense of justice than any common sense had run a few tests, against the wishes of his supervisors, and the distraught parents had learned that their daughter had been killed.

The reward money was offered later that month. More than he had made on a case yet, enough that he'd be able to devote half his time to more serious, important investigations. It was more than enough to immediately secure his interest, especially since it seemed likely that it wouldn't take more than a few hours of reviewing photographs, surveillance footage and testimony to work out who was responsible.

In the end, all he had to do was match the itineraries of the parents with the course of the illness. In the three years since the girl had been born, seven au pairs had lived with the family, most leaving in a hurry with muttered complaints of abuse (but no legal action.) The father travelled, sometimes for months at a time. The daughter worsened significantly while he was gone, indicating that whoever was poisoning her was freer to dose her, not having to work under anyone else's scrutiny.

Because the mother was a prominent, controversial politician, Munchausen by proxy had never occurred to any of the people investigating. The motivation a stranger could have for hurting the little girl blinded police officers to the reality that her own mother had been poisoning her for the emotional pleasure of being seen to be the strong mother, dealing with her daughter's illness. She had always seemed so genuinely _distressed _about it in television interviews.

After an hour and a half of that, Near turns the power off on his computer. There's a reflection of a man in the monitor, standing behind him. He hadn't heard him enter the room. When he turns the chair around to look, there's no one there. He's left in the computer chair, clutching the armrests so hard that his knuckles have gone entirely white. He's seeing people that aren't there. Not informing Roger that this is occurring is approaching a breach of contract.

He knows, as soon as he thinks it, that he isn't going to tell him. Near couldn't bear having to give this up. Mello is dead, L is dead, his parents are dead, Matt is dead, Watari is dead, the orphanage is full of new children who don't remember him (and he wouldn't want to go back there, even if it were exactly the same as when he left.) He cannot give this position up. Without, his existence would be meaningless. He will not give this position up.

He wonders how long it will last, and if he'll run the title into the ground any more than he has so far. He wonders how long the hallucinations can possibly continue, as he rejoins his agents to explain the case results to them, and have them fax it all to the pertinent authorities. It was the mother, she poisoned her daughter for global sympathy and attention.

'Like the Sixth Sense?' asks Gevanni. This almost makes Near swallow his tongue, before it occurs to him that there must be an example of Munchausen by proxy in the film, and that Gevanni can't possibly know he's seeing people. So Near gives Rester his 'can I fire him yet?' look, and receives a gentle head shake in return. It hadn't occurred to him until now that his agents should not know what's happening to him any more than Roger should. There's no knowing what they'll say, or who they'll tell. When did he become this paranoid?

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the father was the one who posted the reward money, not the mother. He paid; a little reluctantly, but he did pay. Near decides he'll have a celebratory cup of tea.

ooooooooooo

While he'd been working, delivery people had arrived from the orphanages. Gevanni had ushered them inside, and helped them unload boxes and boxes of paper and computer parts into one of the many empty rooms in the house. When the first box hits the ground, the agent swears he hears something scuttle inside the wall. This building is infested and disgusting.

There's a surprising amount of it. Information, that is. Near is having everything sent over from the school. With the new generation of candidates being brought up, everything on the Whammy alumni and graduates has to be out of their reach. Especially everything to do with one 'Near.' By extension, the story of his long rivalry with the second candidate, Mello.

Near doesn't intend to go through any of it, really he doesn't. He just needs to have it here, rather than there, where a fresh batch of young geniuses had a chance to get their hands on it. He didn't suspect there were any capable of using it against him, yet, but it didn't hurt to tread cautiously. He would have done the same thing to L, if he had been given the chance.

They line the boxes of files up alphabetically. Each of them is neatly labelled; Attempt, Backup, Catch, Derail, through the alphabet A through Z and then half a time over (Matt and Mello, Near and Normal,) through to poor little Opal and Oleander, then Percival, the first single. The girl who arrived two weeks after Near did, and tried to steal his toy bear.

Lidner doesn't know any of this history, but she does know that more than half of them are dead. There are little black x's next to Mello, Matt, Attempt, Backup, and a dozen and a half others. Apparently, you don't have a long life expectancy, if you grow up the way Near did.

The boxes on _L Lawliet _also arrive, but unmarked. There are so many of them that they require a whole new room, and take up the whole thing, even when stacked as high as the ceiling. They're tied shut in such a way that they'd require a knife to open them. This means Near would know if Halle peeked, and he suspects that his position in the force is precarious enough as it is. The marked boxes, though...

She stands in the doorway to the room, and stares at the ones with Mello's name on them. She could ask permission to go through them, and risk being denied. She could delay going through them until she's sure it what she wants to do, and risk the cameras being set up in the mean time. She could tear them open right now, and leaf through, searching the documents and histories on Mello's childhood, to try to learn everything she could about what made him like that. Why he was loud and impossible and so devastatingly alive. She could do any number of things.

Lidner leaves the room, and goes to start organizing case requests into files based on importance. Even though she knows it's probably one of the stupidest ideas she's ever had, she'll be back in the room tonight. There are two hundred new requests for the great detective L, to be sorted into Near's categories . These include 'useless,' for those that wouldn't appeal, 'many bodies,' for those that require solving on an ethical level as soon as possible, 'much money involved,' for any that aren't precisely dangerous but are certainly famous and serious enough to merit N's attention, and above all, 'lucrative.' The other two agents haven't noticed yet that Near is having to draw less frequently from the last pile, but Halle has, and she's pleased for him.

In the hall, she trips over one of the bloody camera wires. This stupid house.

ooooooooooo

"Are you feeling better today?" Rester asks, as he puts the kettle on and prepares a tea strainer with a little bit of green tea in it. They inherited L's tea set; ornate and impractical, thin china that makes Near's fingers uncomfortably hot when he tries to hold the cup too soon. The tea strainer is silver and lacelike, impossibly delicate and pretty. Near wants to smash the whole thing. It occurs to him that he hasn't answered Rester's question, and that this might be telling.

"I wasn't _feeling _poorly, Rester, I was exhibiting warning signs that I had had a seizure in my sleep. It had no impact on my state of being during the day." There, that was appropriately direct. He glances up, and Rester is smiling, in a faintly pitying way that lets Near know that he's done something socially unacceptable and his agent is taking pleasure in forgiving him for it. He hates being around people like this, it's demeaning.

"So the trip to the hospital didn't worry you, or trigger any negative emotions? You could be feeling better simply by virtue of not being attached to all those monitors, and in your own home."

This is the first time any of his agents have referred to the mansion as home. Near stifles the impulse to correct him. _This isn't my home. _It's an idiotic thought; although he's never become particularly attached to any location enough to consider it his home, the word applies to this place as much as it does anywhere else he's lived. He doesn't care about the emotional connotations the word carries, so why should he care if it's applied to this nightmare of a house? Oh no, he's being too slow to answer, again.

"It would be pointless to react that negatively to the experience in the hospital." Rester's eyes widen, so Near pushes on to explain; "Whatever they were going to discover already existed. I was in no more danger than I was anywhere else. We have not had real security concerns since Yellow Box." Code for 'since Kira fell.'

Now the look on Rester's face is different, more difficult to interpret. Despite the cool facade he tries to put up, his expression betrays faint concern, as well as mild revulsion. Near knows that look very well, too. He has failed to perform in the way that was expected of him, and Rester is wondering something along the lines of the things Mello used to shout. 'Are you even human? Do you have a soul?' Near doesn't care, as long as he gets his tea.

Fingers spider up the back of his neck, and give a lock of hair a mean little tug. Near flinches, and curls his knees to his chest, ducking his face into them. He doesn't bother turning to look over his shoulder at this point, there's nothing there to see. There hasn't been yet, so in all likelihood, there won't be now. (When did it become _likely _that an invisible person was tormenting him?) Near doesn't feel right. He doesn't feel right at all, and it's worse than before. It's building, bubbling, surging upwards, shaking through all his limbs, through his veins and bones and skin. Something is inside him. It's invasive and inappropriate and Near screams, then loses consciousness.

As it turns out, you don't need to be hooked up to a machine to diagnose someone with epilepsy. Rester drops the tea tray as Near drops to the ground, and fortunately for both of them he's had mandatory first aid training. He moves the chairs and tables out of the way as Near stiffens, and stops breathing. Rester actually has his cell phone out by the time Near starts the clonic phase of the seizure, jerking violently on the floor. He contacts their doctor. _Yes, grand mal seizure. Yes, he's positive. Yes, they'll be in later tonight._

In a few minutes, when it's over, Rester rolls Near gently onto his side, slipping his rolled up suit jacket under his head and setting a protective hand on his shoulder. He picks up the telephone again, and dials, but hangs up before he presses 'talk.' It's something about the look on Near's face while he's unconscious. It isn't Rester's place to interfere in that respect. Near can decide what to tell Roger himself.


	3. It

The medication is almost worse than the seizure itself. Two days later, Near is on phenytoin, tucked in bed with his blankets up to his ears, picking at the food his agents bring him half-heartedly at best, occasionally losing his patience and hurtling an action figure at the opposite wall. He can't put a finger on why the diagnosis makes him so angry. All he knows is that the frustration has him practically in tears.

Gevanni sits down at the end of his bed the second day, with the usual breakfast tray of egg, toast, fruit salad and cottage cheese. Near, who is drowsy from the pills, glowers at him faintly. He can't help but resent being woken, because he resents the fact that he was sleeping to begin with. Coming out of it forces him to acknowledge it. He is not himself. He can't keep his eyes open. He doesn't think he could stand if he tried.

"Neil Young had epilepsy," is what his agent starts with. Near doesn't have the faintest idea who Neil Young is. "And so did... I don't remember his name. The senator." Him, Near does know.

"And he had a seizure and drowned in his bath. Furthermore, if you ever consult Wikipedia as a source for cheering me up again, Gevanni, I _will _terminate your employment." The threat makes him feel better. His agent, who is not as unintelligent as he sometimes seems, smiles at him. He knows he's succeeded in cheering Near up, even if it didn't happen the way he intended. He skewers a piece of cantaloupe on a fork, and offers it to Near. Near takes the cutlery from him, and sets about the unpleasant task of feeding himself.

It makes Near feel a little sick, voluntarily caring for his body, which has betrayed him so thoroughly in the last few days. After a few pieces of fruit, he stops again. He's starting to get a creeping feeling in the back of his throat. He's learning to associate it with the onset of a seizure. Desperately, he casts around for a new topic of conversation.

"What happened to Sachiko and Sayu Yagami?" Of all questions, why did he have to ask that one? Gevanni is looking at him with a stupidly touched expression, the way one might a small animal. It makes him want to gag even more than he did before. He is not an altruist. He is not concerned. He isn't even particularly _interested._

"The mother died," Gevanni is explaining, "the girl lives off her family's life insurance. She's still hospitalized, as far as I know..." It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Why is Gevanni telling him this? (Yes, all right, he did ask. But honestly.) He gestures for the agent to leave his room, back stiff and ramrod straight. He's aware that his jaw is clenched. The room is spinning, but it's absolutely imperative that he get out of bed and on to his feet, immediately. He twists sideways, and rests his feet on the ground.

When the hand closes around his ankle, he's expecting it. He looks down this time.

There's an arm.

There's an arm, with a hand attached to it, disappearing under the bed. The flesh is grey, dead, mottled with bruises and spattered with blood. The nails are cracked and have filth underneath them. The bones of the knuckles stand out, stark and white. Blackish green blood vessels running under the translucent skin. The hand around his ankle tightens, and Near opens his mouth to scream. By the time Gevanni makes it back into the room, it's vanished, and Near is pressed back against the wall, knees balled to his chest, shudders going down his back.

This isn't getting better.

ooooooooooooo

Halle continues to go through Mello's files in the middle of the night. Sometimes she feels like someone is watching her. Once she looks up, and sees a blur of white scuttle past the doorway. She assumes it's her employer, who still dresses in white pyjamas, ten pairs rotated through the wash, each of them perfectly identical. It isn't a surprise to her that Near knows what she's up to and isn't stopping her. He's always given her exactly enough rope to hang herself.

She shouldn't think of him so uncharitably. He's very sick. She doesn't know him well enough to realize that while being sick, he'd much prefer her to continue to think of him just as uncharitably as she had while he was well. Emotional nuances have never been Halle's strong suit. She isn't as bad as Near, but she isn't good at it, either.

Mello, though, Mello had always been a cut above the rest in that respect. Mello had shrewd eyes, that watched you like some sort of predator, narrowed and almost golden. He always reminded her of a bird of prey when he was alive, down to the ornate leather he chose to wear. She didn't know the words for them- the antique harnesses and hoods they used to put on trained hunting birds. That's what it looked like Mello was dressed in.

She's thinking about him when a paper catches her attention. It's in a red folder, towards the back, set apart from the others. She doesn't know how she didn't see it before. Her mind must be playing tricks with her. It's probably the stress of seeing Near in this state; it didn't bode well for job security. No one was saying it, but it was becoming more and more clear that he wasn't going to be able to function in the capacity he used to. Or, if he did, he wasn't going to be able to afford their salaries. (She considers feeling bad about it, but it's too difficult, with Mello's life spread out on papers on the floor around her and in a box in front of her. She hates reading all this, learning what she lost.)

There are actually a few papers in the folder. The running header reads _BB re M and N long term viability._ She can't quite work out what this means, but after a few paragraphs it becomes agonizingly clear.

Halle presses a hand over her mouth and closes her eyes tight, trying not to let out any noises that are too loud, that'd draw anyone's attention. She still isn't supposed to be in here, even if Near knows. And she's almost prepared to bet her life that Near doesn't know this.

Slowly, with the file aside, she begins to pack up her box of Mello's secrets. She re-files everything attentively and carefully, the way Gevanni's hands had so patiently rebuttoned her shirt. She shouldn't be thinking about that while she's with Mello.

Lidner doesn't know what to do, so she takes the file to Rester, and slips it under his door. Responsibility deferred.

oooooooooooooo

Near wakes up, still frightened. He needs to use the bathroom.

That would involve putting his feet on the floor.

He'll be damned if he's going to wet the bed for the first time in his life when he's nearly twenty, so he grits his teeth and climbs up onto his hands and knees, and then onto his feet, using the wall for support. This is ridiculous, this is childish, and this is wrong. He can barely stand, thanks to the medication. But the thought of putting his feet down on that floor... it's beyond him to even try.

Near takes a leap off the bed. Hits the ground out of grabbing range and running. He doesn't fall, he staggers straight through into the bathroom, ignoring the fact that the crash must have alerted everyone in the household that something was wrong. It doesn't matter. He slams the door behind him, and sags against it, without turning to try and sneak a peek at what might be living down there.

With the light on in here, and the door closed, everything is the brightest white. There are white tiles on the floor, whitewashed walls, a white sink and a white porcelain tub. The halogen bulbs in a row above the mirror cast no shadows. Not a hint of darkness can touch him.

Near feels like he's about to fall, so he grabs the sink with both hands, and regards himself in the mirror. He's lost colour in the last few days. He's been sleeping so much, but there are still dark circles under his eyes. The corner of his bottom lip is scabbed from where he bit it. He hadn't realized that this was taking such a momentous physical toll on him. He shakes his head, and looks down into the sink.

The sight of the drain bothers him. It's black and gaping, like some sort of wound. He can see grit built up inside it. He has to turn away, and pull his shirt over his head, then take off his pants. He moves purposefully, like this was the plan all along, and steps into the tub. After the nightmare he had, he can't bring himself to start running water for a bath. (Especially not after the talk of drowned politicians.) He turns on the shower instead, leaning against the wall and considering how undignified it would be to request Gevanni to install a rail.

That's when he decides to go back tonight, and see about a different prescription. Not all medications have the same effect on everyone; there has to be some alternative that won't make him feel like this. He'd rather risk seizures than not be able to do his work. He understands, he does understand that that's not a good thought, that that isn't the way he should be approaching the situation, but in the shower, right here and right now, he... really, he just wants things to go back to the way they were before any of this started. Even being back in the orphanage would be more enjoyable.

He turns around, and there's someone in the doorway. There's a long moment, where he swears his heart is going to stop beating, before it finally registers.

It's Melinda.

"Get out!" he shouts, not as kindly or patiently as he probably could have, but it's humiliating, standing naked in front of a middle-aged woman, frightened out of your mind. He's jumping at nothing, now. He's jumping at his housecleaning staff. He staggers out of the shower and grabs for a towel, as Melinda slams the door behind her, hurrying out of his bedroom. The towel, he wraps around his shoulders, drying the tips of his hair then patting down along his back, rubbing the moisture off his arms. His face is uncomfortably flushed, from the steam or the humiliation or the fear. He runs the tap on cold, and bends to splash water on his face.

When he opens his eyes and they refocus on what's in front of him, he can't breathe all over again. The bottom of the sink, creeping up out of the drain, is full of hair. Blond hair. Darker than Halle's, gold and mid-length, and even a little charred at the tips. The room smells like cigarettes and chocolate and Near's legs go out from underneath him, so abruptly that his knee makes an unpleasant cracking sound when they hit the tile and he has to bite back a pained sob.

It's the medication. It's the medication. It's only the medication. When he climbs to his feet, the sink is clean, and the bathroom smells like soap again. He hobbles out into his bedroom, where Melinda is waiting with a scolding about remembering to lock the door. Fortunately, the look on Near's face is enough to send her packing.

Rester looks in, just as Near is curling up in bed, and the young detective looks so frightened and miserable that the older agent rethinks the conversation that he'd come here to have, initially, on the grounds that Near _must _know.

ooooooooooo

His knee swells overnight, from the unwelcome impact with the bathroom floor. And he was going to go in to the hospital anyway, to talk about changing medication. It only makes sense to nod, when Rester asks if he'd like to get checked up. It only makes sense to hold on tight, when he's lifted out of his bed, and _not _because this way he won't have to risk putting his feet on the floor. Because his knee hurts, and he doesn't want to put any weight on it.

Half way down the stairs, he changes his mind. For the sake of his dignity, his happiness, his mental acuity, he demands, suddenly;

"Take me to the computer. We can go tomorrow." Tonight he's going to solve a case. Maybe just one, but he thinks, at this point, anything would help.

The first one he picks up is an interesting one. Lawyers are trying to make a case against a man who claims he killed his wife in his sleep. The Canadian legal system holds sleepwalking as an acceptable legal defence. It's very difficult to disprove, when the patient has a history of that behaviour in their medical files.

Except, look, the doctor was on the man's guest list for his wedding. Near begins building a case that they know each other quite well, well enough to be in conspiracy together to collect on the life insurance policy... which taken out shortly after the wedding, and the first recorded instance of the suspect meeting with that doctor. From there, it isn't difficult to make the jump to searching for other patients who have been put on trial- and there they are. Near builds the case quickly, efficiently, and with not a little relief.

At some point, one of the agents has brought him tea. It's sitting on the desk beside him. He glances at it, but doesn't bother to take a sip.

8am, and Rester comes back in. Near is being ordered- absolutely, unequivocally ordered to go to the hospital. His knee is purple, he's been ignoring it. He has to start the medication change process immediately. The three agents will force him, if need be. He blinks up at all of them, and in a ridiculous way, he can't help but be the tiniest bit touched at their assertiveness. It really is very caring.

They bundle him in blankets, and lift him off the chair. As they do, his foot catches the edge of the saucer, and upsets the teacup onto the carpet. It leaves a large stain on the carpet, that seems to flicker between weak brown and blood red, right in front of his eyes. His teacup is bleeding- no, that isn't right- he was supposed to drink blood. He gives Lidner an odd look as she bends to press a napkin into the stain, without concern for the red it smears all over her hands. Doesn't she see how unsanitary that is? She's at serious risk of contracting a bloodborne disease, infection, or parasite.

After the events of the last two days, he knows better than to comment.

oooooooooooo

The car ride back from the hospital is the first time he allows himself to think the word 'supernatural.' He edits mentally, hastily, and substitutes the word 'paranormal.' He thinks it sounds a little more forgivable, a tiny bit more scientific. The thought of presenting Roger with his report is humiliating; _paranormal events occurring on the Winchester property._

Perhaps if he'd been serving as L for more than a year and a few weeks, he'd consider it. At this point in time, his position is so tenuous that he can't afford the appearance of this kind of break down. He can conceal it, easily, or find proof that something supernatural is occurring. In the meantime, it's best he keeps it entirely to himself.

The one thing he won't be able to conceal for long is the upswing in the amount of hospital trips he's been making. He's not sure doctor patient confidentiality rules apply in his sort of situation (since Roger has more than bought the doctor, a hundred times over throughout the years, since all the files could easily be stolen.) He know Roger will know that he's been going, and the assumptions he's likely to draw from Near's continued silence would be closer to the truth than Near wants.

He opens the mobile phone in the back of the car, and pinches it between two fingers, before dialling the direct line. The fact that it's midmorning is accidental; he could just have easily have phoned when Roger was fast asleep the man would have answered almost immediately.

"L."

The address is purposeful. Roger is attempting to set him at ease. Near grits his teeth, and pretends to fall for it. They can both pretend he isn't still earning his title.

"Roger. There's a situation developing that you should be aware of."

There. The phrasing is polite, the tone is just respectful enough, not concerned, a little exasperated. Near is about to tell him about a minor inconvenience.

"I've been diagnosed with epilepsy." That makes it sound perfect; it's a title, a diagnosis, a theory, something the doctors are saying, not something that's affecting his day-to-day life, not something that's changing his performance in any way. "We've just sorted out the prescription details." He doesn't need to know about the first attempt. Why would he make it seem more complicated than an easy fix? Medicate, eliminate, continue to exist.

"I see," Roger comments, eliciting another stab of irritation from Near. The man does know how to waste words. He's stalling for time. He's an idiot. He can't think quickly enough. Why does L- even a new L- have to answer to _him? _What purpose could this possibly serve?

"Are you all right?" As though Roger is concerned about his welfare. The man couldn't lie convincingly if his life depended on it. Near, on the other hand, pitches his tone to a perfect neutral.

"I will return to my usual productivity level within the next four days." Now that he's put a timestamp on it, he absolutely has to. He hangs up on Roger mid-sentence, and turns off the phone.

And then Rester says;

"There's something we have to discuss."

[AN: for those of you who read Nicotine Patches and Picture Books, I feel it's worth noting that Dostoevsky was also epileptic, which had nothing to do with the inspiration for this fic. Context for the rest- I made a thing of Dostoevsky as Near's favourite author in a longer fic a bit ago. Thanks to those who have reviewed!]


	4. The Dreams in the Witch House

[Authors Note: I do NOT believe in putting notes at the beginning of chapters, but circumstances called for it. A friend pointed out that not everyone has read Another Note, the companion book. The following IS a spoiler. In it, there's a character called B, who is also at the orphanage- Beyond Birthday, who has the shinigami eyes. That's all you need to know to be able to enjoy this fic.]

_MEMO:_

_Beyond Birthday's interpretation of the lifespan of successor N and possible ramifications for his position in the program._

_Beyond Birthday, henceforth candidate 'B,' successfully divines the names and date of deaths of anyone whose faces he can see. Candidate B did correctly gather the name of candidate N._

_Being that candidate B predicted the date of death of candidate N to be in the near future, we the board feel that he be kept on at the orphanage and used as a replacement should L become inactive during the next three years. Should this date pass, his lifespan will be cause enough to reject him from the program. Although candidate M is obviously an inferior option, the comparative longevity is grounds enough to offer him position as L if N will be able to serve for less than two years._

_This information is to be kept confidential for the mental health of candidate N, and to ensure his continued loyalty to the program._

_ADDENDUM:_

_Being that candidate M is deceased in advance, by means supernatural, as it stands candidate N will replace L. Training of replacements should begin immediately. As it stands, N's date of death is still fast approaching._

oooooooooooo

The public library doesn't have much of a paranormal section, but the carpet and the tall bookshelves are so comforting that Near lingers anyways. He's still dizzy, so he sits on the floor, and starts reading. The scientific books are full of pseudoscience, exaggeration, and flat out lies. He puts them aside, and starts on the historical and mythological.

He learns that being closer to death sometimes makes you more attuned to things beyond life. He reads about omens and portents and hauntings and poltergeists. He reads about castles and lochs and negative energy lingering, and he reads about bad things happening in bad places, and staying trapped in time, like a photograph.

Near even reads his first fictional ghost story. He doesn't like it, it's too imaginative. It's clearly made up by someone a little bit fanciful, very desperate to sell a manuscript, and with serious issues regarding his mother's relationships with other men. And probably arachnophobia. The only part that scares Near is when the hero is washing his face in the sink, then looks up to see someone standing behind him in the mirror, only to turn and find there's no one there. It strikes a little too close to home.

A book gets knocked out of the shelf behind him, and falls to the floor with a clatter while he's reading. He starts painfully. It's a mother and her child. It just fell, it _really _just fell, there's absolutely nothing wrong here, and nothing can get him. All the same, he hurries back to where the agents are waiting, leaving his paranormal volumes in a half circle on the floor, surrounding where he was sitting.

Lidner is waiting for him at the front desk, holding two pills, and a book on living with epilepsy. He scowls at her, and takes the medication from her hand, swallowing it dry and ignoring the book. She correctly interprets his lack of orders to the contrary as permission to check it out of the library.

ooooooooooo

In bed that night, he can't help but wonder if it will be the epilepsy that kills him. He could drown in the bathtub. Maybe the dream was a portent? He could fall and hit his head, he could spill boiling water all over himself, or the stress of it could trigger a nervous breakdown. He might go the way of A, and hang himself in his room. He doubts it, though. He's so dizzy from the medication that he probably couldn't set up a noose if he tried, and he doesn't want to climb off the bed if he doesn't have to.

If he wanted to kill himself, what he'd really do is take all those pills.

"Are you down there, ghost?" He mumbles, directed at the ceiling. He doesn't move, but a bedspring creaks, which makes him curl up a little tighter in fright. Maybe addressing it isn't a good idea, but he has to know. "Can you hear me?"

There's no answer. He might be imagining this. He might be talking to himself.

"If you're down there, ghost, you aren't being very logical. If there's something you want from me I'm sure there are much more appropriate ways to get it. Right now, I don't think I could give you anything if I tried." He's not sure he could even move right now, if something were to crawl out of there. The bedcovers at his feet shift, and he looks down as the weight of another person, settles on the foot of the bed. There doesn't appear to be anyone there, of course, which is in some ways better than the alternative.

"Do you want to frighten me? I think you have." No answer, but what was he expecting? "Do you want to hurt me?"

ooooooooooo

That's the last thing he remembers. He wakes up with Gevanni shaking his shoulders, shouting at him, slapping his face. The agent looks drawn and desperate, and Near feels so tired. He can't for the life of him work out what's so _important, _but he's being lifted out of bed, and dragged to the bathroom. Over Gevanni's shoulder, he can see Lidner at the bedside table, clutching the half empty bottle of pills. Half empty? But it was new this afternoon. That doesn't make any sense. Rester is with him, pulling the bathroom door, taking him out of Gevanni's arms and setting him down in front of the toilet, on his knees.

"You've taken too many pills, Near," the tall agent explains, entirely gently, like he's a child to be coddled. "Gevanni saw you from the door. It'll all be all right if you throw up right now, do you understand me?"

No, that's a stupid question. He doesn't understand. He gives Rester a confused, furious look, because what he's saying couldn't possibly be true. Someone shoves a glass of water into his hand, and Near can taste chalk in the back of his throat. His agents are terrified, and then suddenly, not entirely of his own accord, his stomach heaves.

He'd obviously take the pills only a few seconds ago. They have barely begun to dissolve. His eyes are watering, his throat is aching, but once that clears a little he can even read the writing on the ones that are facing up in the bottom of the toilet bowl. There was nothing else in his stomach; he can't remember the last time he's had anything solid to eat. It's been at least a day and a half. The agents don't usually forget to feed him that long, but he can forgive him, they've been distracted.

"I didn't take those," he insists, hanging over the toilet bowl. Another sip of water, to get the acidic taste out of his mouth. "Not on purpose. Maybe in my sleep. Maybe someone gave them to me." Maybe it was the ghost. He can't say that. He looks up; Gevanni looks scornful, Rester looks sympathetic and deeply concerned. Lidner is out in his bedroom, still holding the pill bottle. There are nine tablets in the bowl, that he can count. Near thinks he's going to cry.

"I didn't. Everything is so confused." He has to put the water glass down, his hand is shaking too badly to hold it. He can still taste vomit in the back of his throat and his nose.

"I wouldn't lie to you if I had tried to kill myself." He's staring at Rester. "And I wouldn't have failed. I have a gun." This is a bluff. He'd never shoot himself. He'd just been thinking...

But it seems to work. His agent nods. Rester is Gevanni's boss, so Gevanni nods, and Near glances back over his shoulder at Lidner, who takes a step backwards towards the bed, then starts, like something has grabbed her ankle. She glances downward, then screams. The other two agents jump, but Near does not. It's good to know he isn't crazy. Not completely, at least.

oooooooooooo

He has his first seizure since going on medication. Rester is preparing dinner, and Near is in the living room. He slips off his chair and gives Halle her second unpleasant surprise of the night. Grand mal seizures, technically referred to as 'tonic-clonic' involve two phases. First, Near goes stiff as a board, and stops breathing. His lips turn blue from the lack of oxygen, and one arm happens to protrude at an odd angle. He looks like a doll, dropped on the floor. Then, he begins to jerk and spasm violently. The only thing that can be done is to move the computer chair aside, so he won't hurt himself on it. Restraining him would be a mistake. He isn't in danger of biting his tongue off, that's a myth, his mouth is to be left alone.

It ends in a minute or two, leaving him feeling unwell and dazed, but ultimately well enough to sit up and drink the glass of water she brings him. Since the other two agents are in the kitchen preparing food, she also crouches down next to him.

"There's something in here with us, isn't there?"

Near's breath catches in his throat at the question, and he nods, before handing her the glass back, trying to communicate as much with his expression as he can. He doesn't like it either, he doesn't think it's good, or right. He's terribly frightened. He feels like he's losing his mind. Instead of saying this, he simply notes;

"It's a good thing the surveillance cameras are going to be finished tomorrow."

Who knows? Maybe they'll be the first credible witnesses to catch a haunting on tape. Whatever happens, Near will feel better knowing what's going on everywhere in this building. It isn't that he's frightened of the space anymore; perhaps the books were right, perhaps it is closer to some sort of lay line. It feels as though these events have become smaller than the house itself, focused in on him. He knows, in some deep part inside of him, that running won't do any good. Even if they had somewhere to go, whatever it is would come with him.

Halle must be going to die sooner than the others, to have picked up on it first. Near is going to die sooner than any of them.

oooooooooooooooo

Rester makes curry for dinner, of all things. Near can tell why. The house begins to fill with the smell. It's green curry with vegetables and lemongrass on white rice. It smells like the most appetizing thing in the world, and by the time the plates are put down in front of them, all of them are salivating. A glance at the clock proves it to be four in the morning, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It couldn't possibly have gotten that late, except that it somehow has, and they're now eating curry for breakfast or dinner, Near isn't sure which. He feels positively giddy after his brush with death.

Lidner and Gevanni's feet brush under the table, and they shoot each other startled looks. Rester shoots Near a bemused look, and Near rolls his eyes and looks long sufferingly up at the ceiling. The little scene holds for a few long seconds, and Rester is the one to laugh first. Then they all set off. Near's shoulders shake quietly, and Halle giggles, and Gevanni pretends that he's coughing. Except then they're all laughing in earnest, loudly, and with a faintly hysterical tinge. Nothing is funny. Near has to wipe tears away from the corners of his eyes. He's never laughed this loudly in his entire life.

Afterwards, he feels tired. Like the humour of the moment has wrung all the energy right out of him. He shakes his head when Gevanni asks him if he wants to go to bed, and moves to head for the computer instead. The work men will be here in an hour and a half, he wants to supervise, and in the mean time he can get a little more work done.

Four cases is all he manages, before he's drifting off topic. After what Gevanni said yesterday (or was it the day before yesterday?) about Sayu and Sachiko Yagami, he can't help but want to know a little more. The mother is dead; the news of it pulls up easily. Someone had conducted an interview with Sayu Yagami after the fact, whose whole family had been killed in the course of the Kira investigation. He pulls up that video in one screen, while he gets back to work on the cases.

She's soft spoken in the interview, and sitting up in a wheel chair. Someone has put makeup on her that she keeps rubbing at, absently. Everything about her is demure. Her hair is back in a practical braid, and she can't quite seem to look at the camera. The things she says are all typical. She misses the, she's proud of them, she knows her parents are together, she just wants to take some time to herself and find her place in the world. Yes, she hopes to have children some day, yes, she misses her brother more than anything.

It takes the interviewer three tries to get her on to that subject. She keeps ducking it, looking uncomfortable like she knows she's hiding something and she doesn't think of herself as a good liar. It convinces Near to search her name on their system and sure enough, there are emails. She'd tried to contact them, after Light's death. She'd asked Gevanni questions, he'd responded politely and appropriately. How she had even gotten their information to begin with, but the daughter of a police officer and the sister of Light Yagami must have some ways and means about her. She'd survived Mello, after all. Near glances back up at the screen, and asks her, out loud,

"What did you know about your brother?"

Sayu doesn't hear him, of course, and doesn't answer him. She nods at something the interviewer says and closes her eyes. Tears brim up, and whoever had put her makeup on had had the foresight to use waterproof mascara. It only smudges a little when she wipes at it.

"His name is- was- Light."

And then the screens go dead. The lights go out. The appliances in the kitchen turns off, the hum of power going through the house stops. Near is sitting in the pitch black of the living room, by himself, with heavy velvet drapes hanging over the windows. Cracks of watery, dawn light trickle around the edges of the fabric. He stands slowly, making sure not to hurt his bad knee on the chair or desk.

Something in the darkness _burbles, _wheezes, and starts to slither toward him, and Near gives up and runs for the window. It's a fight for a moment, to get around the chesterfield to it, then to get his hands on the cloth. It's heavy and stiff under his fingers, and it takes more strength than he thought it would to yank open. He can't find the pull, so what he does is climbs inside instead, putting the fabric between him and whatever he can hear moving in the room. Pressed up against the glass, everything looks a lot brighter. Sunlight is reflecting off the dew on the grass, the sky is a soft pink, and there are cars parked on the gravel driveway.

Cars, and one electricity truck. His heart stops pounding quite so painfully. Nothing is wrong, they've just turned off the power while they work with the wires. He's strung out, he needs to do something to calm himself down. If things carry on this way, it'll be the death of him.

As for whatever is still hissing and gasping and spitting on the living room floor, he'll ignore it. If he doesn't acknowledge it, it doesn't exist. If he doesn't open the curtains, it can't get him. The sound, now that he thinks about it, is probably the electrician drilling in the hall. He shouldn't get carried away like this.

The condensation at the bottom of the window pane is soaking through his clothes. The icy water against his skin chills him unpleasantly, as though the suspected spirit in the other room weren't bad enough. He shudders uncomfortably and prepares himself to wait.

Lidner is the one that finds him asleep on the window sill. She lifts him onto the couch, without asking any questions, and brings him a blanket from his bed rather than bringing him up to the bedroom. It's nice to have someone who understands.

oooooooooooo

When the workmen are finishing up, sweeping the sawdust out of the hall and turning the lights back on, Rester brings Near his pills. He'll be in control of administering any and all medication from now on. A glass of water, a smile, and a question;

"You'd lose your position if Roger found out you'd tried to commit suicide?" Near flinches, and stares sulkily at his feet. He didn't try to kill himself, and the way Rester phrased that sounds like an invitation to blackmail. He considers asking if that's what the agent meant, but he glances up and sees the expression on his face. It's concerned, caring, and probably a little parental. Rester is not trying to blackmail him into anything.

"I didn't- but I believe I would." There's no policy about any of this. Candidate A succeeded in the suicide attempt, and as far as he knows, L never tried. Perhaps he should go through the _Lawliet _files to check? "But I don't want to die."

Which is probably the most honest admission he's made in his entire life.

Near is not ready to die.

[Additional note; thanks Vashti, for being proofready and helpful, and thank you to everyone who takes the time to review.]


	5. Poltergeist

A week and four days doesn't sound like very long at all, does it? It's nearly an eternity, in terms of solving cases. Since the Kira case, Near has never encountered a problem that he hasn't been able to solve over the course of a weekend. But it's been two weeks since the haunting began already, and now he has a week and four days left to live, according to the long-deceased Beyond Birthday.

At Rester's request, Near is working on a part time schedule. For him, this means twelve hours a day, six days a week. It's more rest and spare time than he's had in his entire life. He plays with his toys and sets, makes domino castles, and reads for pleasure. Well, not really for pleasure. It's all research. He immerses himself in the best and most famous ghost stories he can find, terrifies himself reading about the lives of other people, and learns what it's like to have to run to the light to turn it on, then walk down the hall slowly, as though he didn't do anything, with his cheeks red from embarrassment. Somehow it helps, reading about it happening to other people. The adrenaline and terror is still there, but it's safer. Maybe it's that it's fictional.

The person under his bed has been ominously quiet the past few days. He's starting to believe he must have imagined it, and is reflecting on whether or not to forget the whole thing when the telephone rings and he just about jumps out of his skin. He waits two rings to answer it, to get his breathing back under control.

"Yes?" There, he finally sounds like himself again. It's such a relief, to feel back in control of his body and his life. The seizures are still occurring, but there's something he can live with.

"It's Roger. I think it would be helpful for you to come into my office, Near." The older man sounds tired, and Near makes a mental note to investigate replacements. He'll need to go into retirement soon, if he carries on like this.

"I'd prefer we spoke over the phone. The timing is awkward; I'm in the middle of a busy period, I don't want to take the time off to travel. If you'd prefer to come here to conduct an interview, that'd be acceptable, but I assure you that this phone line is secure." He can feel Roger's displeasure through the telephone line, hear the words he's biting back in the pause before he speaks.

"As you wish. I wanted to discuss your psychological state. The stress of taking up the position, coupled with recent medical developments-"

Near interrupts him, impatiently.

"I have read the Beyond Birthday report, Roger, but nothing about my day to day life suggest that I'm any more in danger of dying than I was when I left the orphanage." He swallows, ignores the fact that that was a lie, and pushes on. "Furthermore, my date of death has most likely changed since then, as Mello's did, due to the introduction of the Death Note to our timeline. Perhaps his being killed indirectly saved my life, Roger? Given that he would likely have caused my death, since you were going to use my lifespan as an excuse to give him the position, as opposed to me."

The silence on the other end of the line is deafening. He has startled Roger. Reading Macbeth this afternoon was an education in the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The thought obviously hadn't occurred to anyone involved in the decision to take him out of the running. He considers mentioning it, but Roger will be thinking it on his own. No need to belabour the obvious.

"Perhaps it isn't the best time, but there's another event I wanted to discuss." Roger's tone has returned to normal. Near closes his eyes and lets out a breath through his nose. That was a victory, even if it didn't feel like it. Roger is still speaking. "One of the new candidates cut his wrists this morning. We've notified the appropriate authorities, the body will be put in the cemetery."

"Who was it?" A moment after he asks the question, Near is startled by the fact that he doesn't find the news startling at all. "What happened to them?"

There's a long silence from the other end of the line. 'What happened to them' is a strange question to ask. The typical thing happened to them, they killed themselves because of the pressure. Near waits it out, though, he'll force Roger to admit it out loud, that the pressure they put the students under routinely causes them to kill themselves.

"Graham Maffett," Roger finally admits. "He had been having difficulty with the social dynamics. We had hoped he'd recover, and missed the water glass he took to his room that night. He broke it, and used one of the pieces. The cleaning staff found him."

No wonder this house is haunted. People die just up the hill, all the time. The cemetery of children who have been neglected to this point is right outside. Near doesn't allow himself to feel guilty; this was all done before he was instated, how was he to know it was this serious? He himself was proof that the system could be survived. He's epileptic, and he hallucinates, but it still does count as proof.

"I'm going to investigate the feasibility of a house-employed therapist." He says this decisively. Roger gets no say in the matter. "One who would be able to screen and remove suicide risks from the program earlier and more effectively, before we find ourselves under investigation. The body count is almost at the point where L will be called in, isn't it?"

With that, he hangs up on the man that raised him for most of his life. It's difficult not to resent A and G, for being so weak and making everything so complicated. A therapist will be able to help keep this from ever happening again. He puts the phone on the dresser, and lies back, to go to sleep for just a few minutes.

oooooooooooooo

The next morning, the unusual activities in the household begin again. Near wakes up quite early that morning and puts his feet down on the floor without thinking. When they connect with something, he has a moment of sheer terror- but looking down reveals that no one, dead or alive, has a grip around his foot. He's standing on something, thin and damp in places, and warm.

It's a piece of paper. Not only that, it's one of two hundred pieces of paper, scattered in a circle out from around his bed. They're lined, like a college ruled notebook. Like _that _book- all of the agents have been scared to make hard copies of anything, resist writing people's names down, just in case. Near has never shared that superstition, but looking around right now is a little different. He immediately makes the decision to burn every single paper in this room.

Once they're all gathered, and the fire is lit downstairs, Near begins to plot. The agents stand around him nervously, as he feeds the paper into the flames. Gevanni asks Rester a hushed question that Near doesn't quite catch over the crackling noise the burning makes. He's reminded of B, the only student to attempt self-immolation. He must have been lying. It's a week and three days, now, and that simply isn't possible. Near feels fine.

This time, there is security footage he can review. When he's sure that the last paper has been reduced to nothing but a little ash, he nods at the agents and stands abruptly, heading for the surveillance room.

If he'd known when he installed the place that he was going to have difficulties with a local ghost, he probably wouldn't have put it way down in the depths of the basement. Hindsight is, of course, always twenty twenty.

He starts the footage from the point where he fell asleep that night, and watches it on high speed until he notices movement other than his own tossing and turning in his sleep, at which point he pauses, rewinds a little, then watches it at regular speed. He feels the colour begin to drain out of his face.

That hand reaches out from under the bed again. Pausing the screen to lean closer reveals that the person it belongs is most likely male- or most likely was male before they died. No rings, no visible tattoos on the arm. He presses play again, and watches in horror as a second arm emerges and grabs the edge of the bed. The thing seems to pull itself upward and outward. The head hangs down, and keeps the face shadowed. The hair drips with some kind of moisture. The legs lie brokenly on the floor, blood seems to ooze from places. He tries to pause the video to get a look at the face.

When the screen stills, it vanishes, revealing Near's floor covered in the papers already. He snarls at the machine and rewinds, but the man is no longer on the footage. There's nothing, just Near sleeping, then there are papers. No sign of the visitor emerging from underneath the bed. Nothing out of the ordinary; a little glitch as though the computer is skipping a bit, a strange expression on the face of the Near on screen, as though he's having an unpleasant dream.

He takes a furious breath, yanks the power cord out of the monitor that's displaying the video, and storms out of the room. This isn't fair. This shouldn't be happening to him.

ooooooooooooo

Will this even help? He isn't sure. Once the agents have gone to bed, he sneaks downstairs to the room with all the boxes, and picks up one of the taller ones. It's Redo's. He lifts it, which takes some effort, and starts heading up to his room.

Redo had graduated, and moved on to become a hit man for a European government. As far as Near can remember, he still is at it. He would probably work for L, for the right amount of money. He'll have to renew contact using the new alias. There are a list of graduates that should probably be contacted, and wooed onto his payroll. He has a unique group of intelligent people with a variety of incredibly skills at his disposal. He'd be a foot not to make use of it.

He puts the box in the corner between his bed and the wall, nudging it right up against the frame before turning to head back downstairs to get another. He avoids the steps that creak, carefully, so as not to disturb his agents. They'll find out eventually, but Near would prefer it not to be right now.

The next box he selects is Nora's. She was his counterpart, the way Matt was Mello's. She had a nervous breakdown when they were six, and had left the school for good. He remembers watching her play outside. Her hair had been long and red, and she'd cried for her parents every night, before eventually quietly slipping away into catatonia. After leaving the care facility, she had settled down in a cottage in Denmark, as far as he recalled. He doesn't remember what she became, but she isn't one of the ones he'll get in touch with; what use could she possibly be? Except for this- her box joins Redo's, and Near heads back down the stairs.

Edge. Edge had been the next in line, after Matt. Near suspects she could have surpassed him with a little bit of effort, and probably Mello, too. Edge had played her cards close to the chest, slide up and hung back depending on what suited her. Edge had been one of the children who enjoyed bucking the system; she hadn't seen, like Near did, that cheating wasn't going to get them anywhere. L didn't want to see that they could be smarter than him, L wanted to see that they could be smart enough and play by his rules. Edge had disqualified herself early on, though she probably hadn't known it. These days, she's a professional thief. Probably one of the best in the world; Near will send her a video message personally. She'll need to feel special if she's going to be brought on board. It'll have to be in a limited capacity, she isn't trustworthy enough to really be relied on.

He needs two more boxes. The nearest one to the door is Xavier's. It won't do him much good to review these files. Xavier committed suicide very early on, the year after Near arrived in the program. He isn't too sorry about it; at least it means the box is light. Transporting these is starting to hurt his back.

One last box. He looks them all over, and takes Stuart's. He's half way up the stairs when someone takes it out of his arms. The shock nearly causes him to topple over backwards, until he looks up and sees Rester. He breathes a sigh of relief, as the tall agent moves up the stairs toward his room, and sets the box with the others. It's make shift, but Near has effectively walled whatever is under his bed _in. _Rester doesn't seem to have a comment, though Near is sure he must be thinking something awful.

"You didn't take your medication," is what the agent eventually says. "You forgot it at the dinner table. I have it here." He pulls the pill bottle out of his pocket, and tips out two for him, offering them to Near carefully after the boy has finished adjusting the barricade against the ghost.

Near takes the pills, bids Rester goodnight, and climbs over the little wall of boxes into bed. He can't fall asleep for hours. It feels like he has more ghosts in his room now than he did before he went to bed.

ooooooooooo

In the end, it all comes to nothing. He wakes up, and the boxes are stacked in front of the door to his room, upside down and empty. He steps off the bed, and nails dig in to his ankle, more violently than before. The hand yanks, and he kicks at it with his other foot, with a little scream. It vanishes, but only after a few seconds of fighting.

He feels light headed, so he goes to the window and throws it open, taking in deep gulps of fresh air. When his eyes adjust to the sunlight, he wants to cry.

There are thousands of papers scattered across the grass outside. Files and reports and charts, stretching across the lawn and up the hill, out of sight. He can recognize them from here; Xavier, Edge, Redo, Nora and Stewart's lives are being blown helter skelter by the cool morning breeze.

He doesn't even bother to go check the security footage. What's the point? There isn't going to be anything there.

ooooooooooo

Gevanni checks. Gevanni creeps downstairs that afternoon, and rewinds the tape, then fast forwards again. Near tosses and turns in his sleep, Near has a small seizure, but it doesn't wake him. His elbow cracks against the wall in a way that makes the agent wince. Painful, but nothing overtly suspicious.

Four thirty five am, and the boxes begin to shift. For a moment, Gevanni swears he sees arms pushing them outward. For a moment, there's a glimpse of a smile- the most terrifying smile he's ever seen. It's wide and crooked and sick looking, and Gevanni recognizes it but can't quite place it. There's a glint of eyes, eyes that look suspiciously red, and when he slams on the pause button, it's gone. He didn't get a good enough look at the face.

When he rewinds, and plays it over again, it's Near that moves the boxes. It's clear the boy is sleep walking; he lifts each of them individually, and dumps their contents out the window before stacking them in front of the door and lying back down. Gevanni shakes his head. This can't be right, the tape can't show two different things.

He watches it over, and over. The new version seems to stay. He isn't sure what to believe any more.

That night at dinner he asks Halle quietly;

"Do you believe in ghosts?"

She looks shocked, then relieved and frightened, and puts her arms around his shoulders and kisses him. He didn't think this was still happening between them, but she's so warm and soft, and her arms are strong around him. He wraps his around her in return, and pulls her close.

Halle uses the opportunity to whisper, so quietly that no one other than Gevanni has a chance of hearing.

"There's something in the house with us. I think it's going to hurt us all."


	6. City of Glass

Reviewing surveillance footage of the shenanigans with the boxes didn't accomplish anything except to spread the general anxiety of the house to everyone but Rester, who remains largely unflappable even in the face of great mystery and adversity. Near allows himself a rare emotional display, and gives him a raise, since the agent has demonstrated that he's capable of being just as steady as the rock of Gibraltar.

Rester is the one they assign to clean each frame of the security footage, carefully and by hand, looking at it through all the filters imaginable on the shaky grounds that 'that's what they do on the X-Files,' according to Gevanni. (Rester is the one who hears this explanation; if Near had, the assignment would have been scrapped immediately on grounds of frivolity.) Reworking the electronics accomplishes absolutely nothing but to give the senior agent a migraine from focusing on a screen from too long. He goes to lie down early, and doesn't make it to dinner that night.

ooooooooo

Things get quiet after that. All of them feel faintly like it's the lull before the storm; the moment in the movie after the dramatic music ends, where the director is trying to make you feel like nothing is going to happen, but three seconds too late something leaps forward with a crash of cymbals and a woman screams. Gevanni, Lidner and Rester all understand the reference; Near just feels nervous and uneasy and not really sure why.

The encounters go back to being little shoves and hair pulls. Occasionally, something slaps him and leaves pink handprints on one cheek or another. He spends a lot of the time faintly sick to his stomach with nerves and pills. The medication doesn't really settle well with him, but not taking it would be a good deal worse than dealing with this.

Finally, he has four days left, then three, then two.

ooooooooo

On Near's second last day, Rester doesn't make it to dinner that night, and Near tries half heartedly to resent him for it. Lidner and Gevanni can't keep their eyes off each other, even when Near coughs less than politely, and glowers. Their feet brush under the table, and they start.

"I could order you to opposite continents," Near murmurs, half heartedly, "but you'd still find some way to torment me like this, wouldn't you?"

Gevanni clears his throat and changes the topic.

"I was thinking about Mikami Teru this afternoon." It's a strange admission to make; they don't usually get personal with each other. Near thinks for a moment that the agent has forgotten that he's sitting here, and means to direct this revelation only to Lidner. But the man is looking at him, when he continues. "He wasn't the first person I'd ever tailed, but it was the most nerve wracking."

"Understandable," Near acknowledges, "it was the most danger you have ever been in. Raye Penbar and his wife were both killed shortly during and after the period he followed Yagami Light." The reminder isn't precisely tactful, given the parallels. Gevanni and Lidner look at him, then each other, and for a second Near is sure they're going to be angry with him.

"You're very honest, when you put your mind to it," Gevanni eventually comments. Near feels his cheeks heat. (What? How humiliating.) The agent pushes on with what he was saying. "And I knew the danger I was in at the time. But it was more than that. He was a lawyer, he should have been on our side."

Halle reaches out and puts her hand on his on the table, and Near half considers rolling his eyes, but skewers a forkful of rotinni and nods at him to continue. Gevanni shrugs at him, as though he's run out of things to say. Near can appreciate being at a loss for words.

"What scared me about the case," Lidner murmurs, "is that I could see myself doing that, at that age. I mean we're adults now, except for you, Near, no offense, so it's easy to look back and see, but Yagami must have been a teenager when he started all this. Kids make stupid mistakes."

Near tries momentarily to feel faintly sympathetic, but gives up on the effort after a few seconds. The man is dead; what would be the point? Gevanni and Lidner are obviously having some sort of emotional experience relating to the topic of conversation, so he decides not to interrupt it, and goes back to his food. Gevanni has made them pasta with prawns and zucchini. Near is full, so he sets to picking the pieces of seafood out. No sense letting the good parts go to waste.

"I wasn't pursuing him for those reasons," is all he says when asked. Personally, he couldn't list all the reasons why he wanted to kill Light, at this point. Exhaustion, fury, personal pride, competition with Mello: remembering any of it at all seems futile. "I wanted to beat them."

"I think I'll go to bed early," Lidner comments, climbing to her feet. Gevanni nods, and goes to pick up the dishes. Near bids her goodnight and goes to get a glass of water to take his bedtime pills.

ooooooooooooooo

They're working a case about a lawyer. That's why the agent brought it up, Near imagines. He wades through the supplementary research he had them do while he sits in bed that night, alternating between flipping pages and sipping his water, then twirling a lock of hair around his finger when the cup is empty.

The man was from Poland originally, and has gone missing, along with twelve eye witnesses in six different cases he was investigating. None of them appear to have any links to each other than this man. It's a little perplexing; lack of physical evidence, lack of an apparent motive, too clustered to be random, too scattered to be part of anything other than a specific plot.

He lies down to go to sleep when his imagination strikes up and presents him with images of the lawyer as a sort of cult leader, with Mikami's hair and tie, leading the people he comes into contact with off to a bunker in the desert and feeding them koolaid laced with arsenic. He moans faintly, burrows his face into his pillow, and prays that nothing else in his life go wrong for the next twenty four hours.

It doesn't last twenty four seconds. There's a crash from the hallway, a surprised shout, and the unmistakeable sound of someone toppling down a set of stairs. The one outside Near's bedroom, in point of fact.

A few seconds of silence, and then someone runs to the top of the stairs. Halle shouts, and Near grabs the mobile phone off his dresser table and dials for an ambulance before he even gets up; whatever has happened it isn't going to be good. He jumps off the bed (it's second nature by now, not to let whoever is under it catch his feet) and runs to the door as he's connected to emergency dispatch. Gevanni is at the bottom of the stairs, Lidner is at his side, and from what Near can tell, it looks bad.

"Send an ambulance immediately."

oooooooooo

"I was pushed," the agent is able to insist, right away, the moment he climbs into the emergency vehicle. The technician blinks at Halle as she climbs in with him, Near and Rester stay behind; they'll catch up by car. "I was pushed."

The doors close, and Near looks up at Rester. Rester looks solemnly down at Near.

"Permission to make an unprofessional observation, sir?" The man puts a hand on Near's shoulder, steering him carefully towards the garage. Near doesn't like being outside, he can't focus on one train of thought while he's outside. He's afraid of dying while he's outside; there are so many possibilities and catastrophes that could occur. (At this point, being _in there _seems worse.)

"Permission granted, agent." The formality is almost for play. Near doesn't require this of them, and Rester knows it, but it's easy to fall back on the comfort of the hierarchy in place. By reaffirming Near's status, Rester reaffirms his trust in him, by doing so immediately before offering him a piece of information. What follows is being told to him in a professional capacity; how he responds to it will reflect on how he is going to take care of his agent, who is currently perturbed by something. This all occurs to him in the course of a split second, then Rester is speaking to him again.

"I've come to the conclusion that there is something unexplainable going on in that house."

Bless Rester, for putting it that way. Near reaches out and grabs his sleeve, letting the other man walk him to the car. Just as quickly as before, their relationship is reversed. Near is a child and Rester is a grown up. Near is afraid of a ghost, and Rester is going to put him in the car and drive him away from this place.

ooooooooooooo

Rester loads and buckles Near in to the back seat of the car, before glancing up at the house. For a moment, there appears to be a man standing in the window of the room where the boy sleeps. He spots a flash of shining hair, an unhealthy pallor, and _eyes _that seem to-

But it's gone again, and then he can barely remember whether or not it was there to begin with. He shudders, and climbs into the front seat.

ooooooooooooo

The hospital is busier than usual. There was a spate of freezing rain in the city and the halls are littered with the casualties of slips and falls, with bumps and scrapes and sprains. There are one or two major car accident victims, but they make up the minority. With Rester's badge and Gevanni's identification, it doesn't take long for them to get a doctor to attend to the man. It wouldn't have taken long to begin with; it's painfully obvious that the agent has broken his leg, _and _sprained an ankle. He'll be bedridden for a long time, and in the hospital for a few days at least. Halle looks devastated and furious. Gevanni, for all that the drugs they have him on have clouded his mind, seems aware of her distressed and charmed and flattered by it, in strange ways. Near watches their interactions closely, and mentally notes that not one, but two of his agents have been effectively incapacitated.

"We'll leave Lidner in the hospital with you tonight," he decides, when it's obvious that Gevanni will be staying and that he can't keep his eyes open much longer. Their continued presence will only disturb him. "I'll send Rester back in the morning, they can take shifts guarding you. You can't be left here alone, in any case. This location isn't secure. We'll move you as quickly as we can arrange; for tonight, don't discuss any details without getting into contact with me first. Not even your doctor, do you understand?"  
Gevanni nods, sleepily, and Lidner's hand strays to her gun at the thought of someone arriving here with the intent to do something unsavoury. She will keep an excellent watch over him, and Near is content to let Rester walk him towards the car.

He doesn't relish the prospect of going home, so when he sees the sign on the door, he stops them. As unsavoury as the concept is, it seems more desirable than going home right away.

"Wait in the hall," he suggests to his agent, before slipping carefully into the mental health wing of the hospital. The time has probably come where he needs to admit to himself that some sort of professional help is required. Whatever his agents may or may not be seeing, _Near _ is seeing a ghost.

The woman at the intake desk smiles at him comfortingly, which only serves to twist the knot in his stomach a little bit tighter than it had been before.

ooooooooooo

"This process is just to place you where you need to be. I'm going to ask you a lot of rapid fire questions, I want you to answer them as honestly as you can."

The intake worker is looking at him closely. Near hunches his knees to his chest on the chair, and twirls a finger through his hair, giving the man a stony look in return. He doesn't appreciate being examined in this manner; it doesn't occur to him that he does it to everyone else, but Near isn't the most self-aware of people.

"Proceed."

If this startles the doctor, he shows no sign of it.

"What's bothering you?" Which is a phenomenally loaded, open ended question that Near has absolutely no interest in answering. He closes his eyes and reminds himself that therapy probably can be useful, as long as it isn't with _this _person.

"I believe my house is haunted." If he weren't protected by doctor patient confidentiality rules, he'd never have admitted that out loud. It feels good to say it. "And I believe that that belief indicates that I'm unwell. I'd like to pursue treatment."

The man only gapes at him for a second or two, before schooling his expression into an appropriately sympathetic smile. Near wants to roll his eyes.

"What do you think is going on?" The therapist asks, very carefully.

"Severe hallucinations. Probably stress related; they coincided with the onset of my epilepsy." He can tell by the look on the man's face that he should have admitted that right off the bat, that hiding it has somehow made him seem suspicious, or susceptible to the stress of it. "A highly stressful home and work environment and other pressure."

They're slipping in to the routine, now, the questions therapists are supposed to ask for risk assessment. Has he lost weight? Has he thought about killing himself? How is he sleeping? It's a little alarming to hear how far gone he sounds; yes, he barely breaks one hundred pounds when he's soaking wet, yes, he'd rather not eat sometimes, yes, he took too many pills but it wasn't _serious. _The therapist obviously finds it a little alarming himself, because this doesn't go the way Near had hoped it would.

ooooooooooooooo

The doctor tries to have him committed right out of the intake interview, after hearing about the suicide attempt. Near actually is forced to use the desk phone to contact the agent's cell- he'd should for him, but it seems a little counterproductive. The agent answers, and comes in at Near's orders, folds his charge under one arm and begins talking to doctors the way only a parent or guardian really can; assertively, protectively and carefully.

Rester does end up having to come in and rescue him. Which is to say, he signs him out as a legal guardian, is informed about Near's dangerous, suicidal tendencies and delusions, and is told the best procedure for making sure nothing happens. _Don't leave him alone. Don't let him have access to anything dangerous. Don't- don't- don't. _Near sits in the lobby chair and glares at them as they talk over him like he isn't there. This is dehumanizing and humiliating, and the entire healthcare system is in need of serious reform, as far as he's concerned.

They prescribe him antidepressants immediately, and give them to Rester, with instructions on use murmured too quietly for Near to overhear entirely. It's very clear to him that they're trying to take the situation out of his hands. Rester nods along, and extricates him from the mess he's created, albeit with the best of intentions. Near sulks all the way home.

In the car, the agent glances over his shoulder at Near, rolls down the window, and tosses the pill bottle out into the creek that they drive along side to get home from the hospital. Near closes his eyes, smiles, and rests his forehead against the car window as the dawn begins to break over the tops of the hills. The antidepressants go bobbing down the little stream like a message in a bottle, until water leaks in and they sink. Eventually, they wind up in the home of one very confused muskrat.

There are some things that are more improbable than a haunting. One of them is Near accepting that he's simply gone crazy.

oooooooooooooo

The figure is back in the window of Near's room when he and Rester return him, but neither of them see it. It presses up against the glass, and exhales an icy breath. It's hands curl into clawed half-fists, before drawing downwards along the glass with a noise that'd split the eardrums of anyone near enough to hear it. It leaves little patterns, frosty leaves where it's fingers have clawed and raked. As Near's soft footsteps begin to climb the stairs, it crawls back under the bed.

It doesn't have much longer to wait.

ooooooooooooo

It doesn't occur to Near until he starts to climb the steps up into the house that this is probably his last few hours alive. Tomorrow he's supposed to die, according to B's predictions. A time of death wasn't indicated, but it can't be far off now. It's his last day alive, and he's exhausted from the late night hospital trip, and the run in with the therapist, and the whole awful situation.

He's going to spend most of what might be his last day on earth fast asleep, and that's absolutely fine with him. Rester looks too tired to remember what day it is exactly, and what's happening to Near. Gevanni is too drugged, Lidner is too worried about Gevanni. Which is fine with him, he doesn't want much of a fuss or mess. His agent manages to murmur, as he climbs the stairs behind Near;

"Don't forget to take your medication before you go to sleep."

Near nods. He probably would have remembered, but he might not have, so he's no longer allowed to chide Rester for useless reminders. He doubts he'll be in a position to chide Rester for anything for a very long time, at this point, the number of unpardonable mistakes he's made this week. He toes off his socks at the door to his room, and makes sure not to glance down under the bed before creeping into the bathroom.

The first thing he does is check the sink for that awful hair. It's back again, the porcelain littered with strands and clumps of blond, and all he can do about it is slap the mirror ineffectually in frustration. All _that _does is hurt his hand, so he opens the cabinet to get out the pill bottle. He turns to look over his shoulder to make sure no one's there before closing the mirrored door, still faintly afraid that a figure will turn up in it, standing behind him.

Nothing does, of course. He sighs at himself, opens the childlock on the bottle, and tips the little capsules out into his palm.

They begin to crawl. Near shakes them out of his hand on reflex, and drops the bottle in the sink with a strangled little cry. The maggots roll along the porcelain, squirming and waving ineffectually. Some of them spill down the drain. One is still between his fingers. He flicks it off fast and staggers backward, bile rising in his throat. He's been eating those. He's supposed to take two- he's supposed to put two of the wretched little things in his mouth. Are they crazy? What do they want from him?

Landing on his knees without realizing it turns out to be surprisingly painful. The one is still in bad shape from last time; repeated abuse is certainly not what it needs. It twists out from under him when he tries to stand, and he has to lunge to grab on to the door knob. It's either that or the sink, and he can hear the things still moving inside it, whirring to life, buzzing and hissing.  
Near is horrified to hear himself let out a sob. He flees the bathroom, slams the door, and hobbles back to his own bed. He doesn't remember to leap on, but whatever is underneath it seems to have mercy on him this time. He crawls to the corner, and curls up into a tight ball. Once the blankets are pulled up over his head, and his face is hidden in the pillows yet again, he starts to really lose his grip. It's strangely relieving. The self-control crumbles, the tension in his throat explodes, and though he'll never admit it to anyone, Near cries himself off to sleep.

[AN: Sorry for the delay in posting. I suffered a serious back injury which pretty much knocked me out, as well as pretty much all of my creativity for a good long while. This is the second last chapter, minus the epilogue. Thanks for sticking with me so far!]


	7. Exorcist

Waking up the next morning hurts. The light from his window hits his face, which brings him up out of his sleep much sooner than his body would have liked. Near feels sick, and muzzy headed; he knows he shouldn't be skipping taking his pills, but he also knows, with just as much certainty, that if he does take them they'll change back to insects in his mouth. He'll forego them for a few more hours. It hasn't been that long, has it? A day? Two?

His stomach growls, urgently, and he nods to himself. He should eat. He will eat, in a moment. Right now, the sun is streaming through his window and he doesn't want to move. The bed is warm, the sheets are soft, the pillows are comfortable and perfect.

One of Near's earliest memories is dawdling in bed in the morning. He'd hid under the blankets and played with his socks, assigning each of them a distinct personality and having them sit down and engage in a discussion about the likelihood of being given pancakes for breakfast versus waffles, allowing for the tired-guardian-cereal contingent. The socks had come to the conclusion that waffles were more likely, but had failed to factor in the guardian's understanding of Near's preferences; the pancakes had been delicious, and delivered in the shape of the caterpillar from the current favourite story book. He'd slathered them in butter and syrup.

Now he really is hungry. It takes him a moment to remember that Gevanni is still hospitalized, and Halle is likely there with him. There's only one other person in the house.

"Rester?"

Silence. It doesn't sound as if the other man is in the house. Near listens for him carefully, and calls out again, louder this time.

"Rester!"

Nothing. And it's at this point he notices something else. His voice echoes loudly in his room, and he can hear a tap dripping in the bathroom. One of the faucets needs tightening. But that's all he can hear. There's no hum of electricity from the rest of the house, no whirr of the dishwasher or laundry machine. The television isn't on, the radio isn't on... it's all peculiarly silent, as though there's been a power outage and everything has been shut off.

He can't even hear the birds outside his window; he can see them, sitting in one of the trees. They're loud enough to wake him some mornings, but not today. Near sits up, and raps on the glass. They hear it, obviously, because they startle out of the tree and flock away. Near knows he should be able to hear them sounding out warnings, but he can't hear anything. All there is is his own breathing, the rustle of the sheets as he crawls along them, and the dripping of the bathroom tap.

"Rester!"

He isn't coming. Near forces himself to face that reality, and draws a deep breath or two. There are two options. He could stay here indefinitely, and wait for someone to arrive, getting hungrier and hungrier, or he could go to the door and leave. It wouldn't be hard, all he'd have to do is walk across the room. He must be imagining this, like he's imagining everything else.

Forcing himself to remember the therapist in the hospital, Near takes a deep breath, pulls the blankets off himself and climbs out of bed.

This turns out to be a mistake.

000000000000

One second, Near is on his feet, the next he's slammed face first against the floor, hard enough that he thinks he's chipped a tooth. He doesn't have time to process that, though, because something has his feet and is dragging him, physically, back towards the bed. Near forgets to scream, but manages to kick one leg free and lift it enough to brace it against the frame. He knows he can't let himself be pulled under there, so he fights for all he's worth, kicking and clawing at the ground as he's pulled.

Eventually, he manages to land a solid hit. He feels skin mash against his foot, and hears a dull crunch of bone snapping. He's hit a nose. Whatever it is yelps and releases him, and Near scrambles away as fast as he can. This time, he makes the mistake of looking back.

Light Yagami is underneath his bed, grinning at him, pale skinned and bleeding where Near kicked him. His eyes are hollow and dark, his hair is dank, and tangled in clumps. And this time, this time his hand reaches out. It's the hand Near recognizes, all broken fingernails and veins and bones. Now there are two hands. Now the top of his head; Light is pulling himself out from under the bed. Light is coming for him.

He's too frightened to scream. He runs for the door, and tries the handle. It's locked, of course. He rattles it for a moment, pounding on it in the hopes that Rester will hear and come, well aware that he won't, that there isn't time, that Near is alone in here with this thing.

Behind him, there's a shuffling, lurching step. He turns again, and Light is still there, still giving him that look, still lurching toward him. Near can hear him breathing. No, he isn't breathing, he's laughing. He feels his heart just about stop in terror, and he wonders if this is really going to be how he dies, and if Beyond Birthday had ever known it.

"Near." He starts, when the person speaks, and looks up, expecting it to be Light. It isn't. The grin is still fixed on Light's face. The voice is coming from the bathroom. The door there swings open, and Near does the only thing he can think of.

He runs to it. Ducks past Light's clumsy arms and lurching body, finally screaming as he nearly trips on the edge of the carpet, and throws himself through the bathroom door, into the little room. He does fall, now, and by all rights he should knock himself unconscious on the tile floor, but something catches him and the door behind him slams shut.

Strong arms wrap him up, and lower him to the floor. For a second he thinks it's Rester, but it isn't. Then it's his father- but it isn't him either. He's pulled against a thin body, and held, and for a few seconds that's enough. The illusion of comfort and of safety. Near can't remember ever being held like this; strong arms that are going to make the monsters go away. Before his parents died, maybe, when he'd crawl into their bed between them and his mother would hush him back to sleep.

"You're doing okay, kid," murmurs Mello, gruff, softer than Near ever remembers him being. If the arms around him are colder than a living human's might be, that doesn't matter. Childhood rival or not, dead or not, Mello is here and promising to keep him safe, and Near isn't going to question that.

00000000000000

That's the honeymoon period. It lasts about an hour. Mello's dead fingers wander through Near's curls, and Near's heartbeat slows, and stops hammering in his throat.

"You're a good L." Mello is the first to speak. His voice sounds as if it's coming from far away, and the words seem... uncharacteristic. Near looks up at him and pulls away just a little, frowning. Mello is the age he was when he died; young, scarred, bitter looking. Near doesn't hate him as much as he used to. Mello must not hate him much either, any more. Maybe death gives you some kind of perspective.

"Thank you, Mello," Near answers solemnly, unsure as to why the reassurance means something. Maybe it's knowing he's occupying the position that Mello was fated to have. Before the business with the death notes began. Near is supposed to be dead soon. Mello frowns at him, as if to say 'don't think that,' and Near has to wonder if Mello can hear his thoughts.

It ceases to matter when the thing outside (it's too far gone to really be considered Yagami anymore; just some angry remnant of what he used to be) starts to claw and the door and snuffle at the crack between it and the floor, huffing and hissing and wanting _in._ It makes Near shudder, which makes Mello frown.

"I've been trying to stop him, but I'm not strong enough. You're safe in here for now, but he'll get through eventually." He still sounds so distant. His affect is flattened, too. Near watches him, and wonders if he ever misses him. He decides that he doesn't, but he's still glad he's here now.

"What do I do, Mello?"

The ghost grins at him- cocky, fiery like he used to be. Near swallows, and listens to the plan.

00000000

As plans go, this isn't much of one. An all or nothing bolt for the stairs, down the hall, out the front door on Near's part while Mello tries to hold back the other ghost is so obvious that a two year old non-successor could have thought it up.

It's also all they can do. Near forces himself to stand, and puts his hand on the doorknob. The metal is inexplicably icy cool under his fingers, but he keeps a hold on it. The door stops rattling, as though Light can tell someone is about to emerge.

"There are two things you need to know," Mello is telling him, standing right behind him and speaking in softer tones.

"First of all, you'll have trouble leaving the house. Your emotions will be a wreck. You'll second guess yourself. This place is going to do anything it can to keep you here. It hasn't lost you so far and it doesn't want to lose you now, so whatever you feel, keep running."

He'll pour over that later, dissect the implications of anthropomorphizing the house as having desires. Surely a building cannot _want? _But if it doesn't, how is it that he's still living here? Shouldn't he have left days ago?

"Second of all." Now Near feels Mello's hand on his shoulder. "...there isn't time. Rester is pulling into the driveway, and I can't get both of you out of here. You're going to need him to get you to the hospital. Get out of here, right now."

000000000

The run is an out of body experience. Near feels himself stagger forward through the door, and is aware of the screams of fury in the room with him as Mello and Light lunge for each other. It sounds like nothing he's ever heard before, and like nothing he's ever imagined hearing. He doesn't have time to think more than that, before he's out of the room and into the hall.

The stairs are ahead of him, faster than he thought they'd be. He nearly trips down them, and manages to catch himself on the banister, sobbing for breath and trying not to scream; it'd be illogical, there's no one going to hear him.

The bedroom door bangs against the wall behind him, and Near wastes a second pretending that maybe Mello's won, that he can stop running and they'll go into the kitchen and have tea and chocolate and discuss politics. He lands on the bottom step and his knee jars badly, but he doesn't stop hobbling forwards. He never was particularly good at lying to himself.

Near doesn't have to look over his shoulder to know that Light is on the stairs behind him. He can feel the ghost approaching. He can feel the world around them start to freeze; he doesn't stop moving, but suddenly every step he takes seems to last forever, and the door ahead of him seems so far away. Part of him wants to stop now, stumble to a halt and lie down, and just let whatever is going to happen happen.

Mello is upstairs. Mello is probably badly hurt; he was dead, but he probably isn't coming back this time. Mello wants him to keep running no matter what, and says the house will try to stop him. Near keeps running. His hand closes on the door knob as Light takes the last few steps towards him, and he still can't turn to look, not to save his life. He stumbles forward, across the threshold, just as those clammy fingers clamp on the back of his neck.

And worse. They sink in through his skin, immaterial some how, but also there, horrible and pressing. Near collapses, face down on the front porch, as Light Yagami tries to crawl into his mind through his skin. Every part of him objects to this action on a physical and fundamental level. He feels it, this time, as another seizure begins.

At first, in the distance, he hears Rester screaming. Then he doesn't hear anything at all.

Brains do not make good battle grounds, and unbeknownst to Near, his has been the location of something of a war. Light tries once more to slither into him, pushing at walls and defenses that, once formidable, are finally beginning to crack and give way under the strain. Whether the attempted possession triggered the seizures, or the seizures were an invitation to possession isn't precisely clear. Light isn't human enough to be able to articulate chains of causality, and Near is unconscious, convulsing on the porch.

Neither of them is giving up this time.

000000000000

When seizures last more than thirty minutes, brain damage and death can eventually occur. Rester is the one to call the ambulance, and pull Near off the porch. He doesn't know what's going on, but he isn't stupid. He makes a promise to himself; if Near gets through this, none of them is ever going to set foot in that house ever again. He'll sign the demolition papers himself, if he has to. He hovers over Near, trying to make sure he doesn't hurt himself with the thrashing, until the ambulance arrives.

What saves him is a combination of serious medication, and distance from the site of the haunting. The siren blares as they speed away, and Light's hold on him stretches, stretches, and finally snaps. Mello, bloody and tired, sprawled on the floor of Near's bedroom crows out his laughter. Near sits up on the gurney and screams, nearly causing the driver to wreck the vehicle in shock.

Near makes it. When ghosts are involved, you sometimes can cheat death.

000000000000

"But why are you still alive?" Gevanni asks, from the chair by the window, trying to wrap his head around the whole idea a little more.

"Because Mello died," Rester explains, sparing Near the trouble. Near has his mouth full of jello anyways, and feels a little too wrung out to do any serious explaining.

"B made his predictions at a point in time when Mello was supposed to live longer than Near, so Near's date of death couldn't have accounted for Mello's help in getting him out of there. The prediction was probably entirely unrelated to the house- it might have just been the epilepsy." If it even is that, all of them add mentally. Near has been in the hospital for three days, and is back on his medication. He hasn't had a seizure since leaving the house, but there's no real way to test out whether or not it's going to stay that way. Only time will tell.

"I will have to live out the rest of my days without knowing when it will end. The rest of mankind does so, I see no reason why it should inhibit me in any way," Near observes, between bites from the jello-cup. "It might be a refreshing change of pace; an exercise in normalcy. Perhaps we should also acquire a golden retriever."

All of them know him well enough to recognize this as a joke. Halle smiles, and climbs to her feet.

"I'll go get us something for dinner."

0000000000000

In the house, back in that valley, Light Yagami leans his forehead against the window pane and screams. Mello crawls up inside the bathroom tap and hides in the water, to try to get away from the sound. Near is away from both of them; for him, it is over.

For the two ghosts, trapped together by some metaphysical accident tied up with a lot of rage and all Near's memories and guilt, forever is just beginning.

[AN: And it's done! Thanks to everyone who's been reading and reviewing, and sorry for the massive delay on the final chapter. I don't know what happened, but I finally made it. Hope everyone enjoyed it, and even though a lot of you guessed the ending in the reviews, I hope I managed to maintain SOME suspense, haha.]


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